Be flexible on deadline

Almost two years after the state launched the Road Home program, about 14,000 applicants remain tangled in the program's web because of pending issues about their eligibility.

Two weeks ago the state gave the applicants a Sept. 5 deadline to resolve those issues or be declared ineligible for grants.

But state officials now are backing down slightly, promising not to rigidly enforce the deadline and that every case will be reviewed before a final determination is made. They need to make good on that promise.

Many applicants, including more than 18,000 who have no pending issues and are just waiting for a grant closing, have spent months or years to get through the messy program. It would be no small amount of chutzpah for state and program officials to now be impatient with applicants, considering that the program's arcane rules and its awful execution have been responsible for delays in thousands of cases.

State officials said the applicants affected by the Sept. 5 deadline were mailed forms that let them request extensions. But advocates said many applicants won't understand that they have to ask for such an extension or how to explain their case well enough to justify a deferral. Many of the remaining program participants have little trust in the program -- a problem the state can repair by treating their cases individually.

Paul Rainwater, the Louisiana Recovery Authority's executive director, said he understands the public's pleas and its distrust of the program. He said the state, however, needs to get an idea of how many pending applicants really want to complete the process for a grant. That is important.

But being flexible with the deadline is the only way to ensure no applicants will be unfairly stripped of their right to a grant. To that end, the state should expand the outreach efforts it has made recently with sessions where applicants can come and resolve pending problems. Hundreds of people attended the first three sessions, and LRA officials said 38 percent of those applicants were able to resolve issues that had been holding up their cases.

That should encourage homeowners with pending eligibility questions to take advantage of upcoming outreach meetings. These are scheduled in our region: Tuesday at the North Shore Harbor Center in Slidell, Aug. 26 at a location to be announced in New Orleans and Aug. 28 at St. Patrick's Church in Port Sulphur, all from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

But the burden is on the state to make sure applicants in the pipeline this late in the process do not get thrown out just because of an arbitrary deadline.